She threw back her head and smiled with hard satisfaction.  “I’ve been trying to figure if you had killed your imagination.  Think it over.”

She gave him the tips of her fingers.  He returned their languid pressure and departed.

As he drifted down the hall he heard her calling, half gaily, half derisively, after him: 

“Don’t decide on anything rash now....  Sleep over it!...”

* * * * *

He thought it over for three days and when he called on Lily Condor again he found her divorced from her languishing mood.  She was dressed for dinner down-town, and he had to confess she had made the most of what remained of her flaming hair and dazzling complexion.

He felt that she guessed the reason for his visit, although she took care to let him force the issue.

“About Miss Robson,” he said, finally, “I’ve concluded to take you at your word.”

Lily Condor smoothed out her gloves and laid them aside.  “Take me at my word?  You’re welcome to the suggestion, if that is what you mean.  As a matter of fact I wasn’t serious.”

He was annoyed to feel that he was flushing.  He could not fathom her, but he had a conviction that she had been serious and that this attitude was a mere pose.  “Nevertheless, I think it can be managed,” he insisted.  “And I want you to help me.”

She listened to his plan.  “What you will call a Daddy-Long-Leggish pretense,” he explained to her with an attempt at facetiousness.  “You to do the hiring and ... and yours truly to provide the wherewithal.  Until things look up a bit.  Of course then ... why, naturally, when things look up a bit for her....”

But Lily remained lukewarm.  She wasn’t quite sure that it would be ... oh, well, he knew what she meant!  It seemed too absurd to think that he had given an ear to anything so extravagant.  She would like to be of service to Miss Robson, of course, but, after all, she felt that it was taking an unfair advantage of the girl.

“If she’s everything you say she is, she’d resent it all tremendously,” she put forth as a final objection.

“But she isn’t to know!  That’s the point of the whole thing,” he explained, with absurd simplicity.

“Oh, my dear man, she isn’t to know, but she will, ultimately.  You don’t suppose the secret of a woman’s meal-ticket is hidden very long, do you?  And, besides, you couldn’t offer her enough to live on.  That would be absurd on the very face of it.”

“Oh, well, I could offer her enough to help out a bit, anyway, and half a loaf you know....”

He broke off, amazed at the determination her opposition had crystallized.  She looked at him sharply and rose.

“I must be running along,” she commented as she drew on her gloves.  “I tell you, I’ll go call on Miss Robson—­some day this week.  A woman can always get a better side-light on a situation like this.  There are so many angles to be considered.  She must have relatives.  You wouldn’t want to make a false move, would you, now?”